w3m: No Ordinary Text Browser

See the WWW in English

January 19, 2001

Before Mosaic and Netscape dominated the Web browsing scene,
there was Lynx, the original text browser.

Once Lynx was the best tool for surfing the Web, simply because
the only thing on the Web in the early days of its existence
was nothing but text. Who needed graphics capability,
after all, to read hyperlinked academic papers and news reports?

Then the Age of Mosaic dawned, and suddenly text browsers like
Lynx seemed to fade to an existence of obsolescence. But Lynx
did not go anywhere, and in fact is still in use by a lot of
people across the globe. Other text browsers are still around
as well, not the least of which is a Japanese text browser known
as w3m.

w3m, an acronym that stands for See the WWW in English, is
the creation of Akinori Ito, who originally created w3m from
a UNIX-based pager application known as fm. Ito originally used
w3m as an e-mail reader and a general-purpose file reader. He
was also using it as a Web browser, but many pages did not render
properly because they were using tables to create page layout--something
w3m could not handle.

After one unsuccessful attempt to create a page renderer, Ito
tried again in 1998, when he was a visiting researcher at Boston
University.

"I didn't intend to write a perfect table renderer because
tables I used was not very complicated," Ito wrote on
his old w3m
home page, "However, incomplete table rendering made
the display of table-layout pages horrible. I realized that
it required almost-perfect table renderer to do well both in
`rendering (real) table' and `fine display of table-layout page.'
It was a thorn path."

Ito's efforts were successful, and w3m became a more functional
Web browser.

I tried w3m out myself on a Linux box, and was interested to
see how it laid out complicated pages. Most pages I visited
seemed similar enough in layout to the graphic versions for
me to follow what was going on. Navigation is handled with the
keyboard only, and full instructions are found in w3m's manual
or in the runtime help screen you can get by pressing H.